


one thing (or the other)

by rougeatre



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, F/M, Female Friendship, Femslash, Gen, all dialogue between women, slightly meta i suppose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-28
Updated: 2018-06-28
Packaged: 2019-05-29 21:42:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15082325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rougeatre/pseuds/rougeatre
Summary: "It’s men that started this war, and it won’t be men who end it. It will be women. Do you hear me? Women, like you and me."





	one thing (or the other)

**Author's Note:**

> Where were the other women?

0\. baby

She goes outside in her bare feet for the feeling of it. Her ritual, Spring being underway. An inventory of the feelings: grass, soft and wet on the delicate soles of her feet (can you feel green?); hunger, hard and reassuringly real in her belly; Harry, curled impossibly sturdy impossibly fragile against the rise and fall of her chest. Harry. She kisses the top of his head as a reflex. He squirms against her, little warm baby movements, but doesn’t wake. There’s nothing, she thinks, no way to conceptualise this kind of love, except for feeling it endlessly tugging at her chest.

“Looks like rain,” she murmurs against the soft skin of his head. Feels like rain, she should have said. Only a few clouds in the sky, pale, like whispers of war in murky corners of pubs. Not much to look at if it weren’t for the feeling all around, heavy, the air sagging with it.

It doesn’t matter what she should have said. Harry is a baby. He doesn’t understand.

She watches the clouds for a moment longer and then turns to go back inside.

  1. mother



She is seven years old, perhaps eight. It’s hard to place the memory. To go on: Petunia is having to help their mother in the kitchen, but Lily is still too little, allowed to play in the back yard instead. Some complex imaginary game – she used to have a whole casts of imaginary heroes and villains, sprawling universes and deathly battles. She might have laughed if she knew how portentous this was, given what lurked in her future, except for the fact that seven-year-olds rarely have a firm grip on irony. And so she runs around their yellowing lawn quite happily in her blue pinafore, dodging the rickety old swing and her mother’s meticulously kept flowerbeds. Occasionally she catches Petunia’s envious glance through the kitchen window.

After a while she gets bored and comes into the kitchen. “What are we having for tea?” she asks.

“Flan,” replies Petunia. She’s peeling potatoes, standing with her back very straight to look important. She likes to pretend she enjoys being all grown up helping Mum in the kitchen, but really Lily knows she wants to be playing outside with her. To be honest she wishes the same. Games are always more fun with someone else to play with, even when Petunia is being bossy (which is always). Still, with their mother’s back turned she sticks her tongue out at her.

“Mum! Lily’s being annoying.”

“I’m not!”

Her mother turns on her. “For goodness’ sake Lily, haven’t you got better things to do than wind up your sister?”

Lily wrinkles her nose. “I don’t like flan.” It’s always soggy, and the horrible slimy cheese makes Lily want to gag.

“Well you’re eating it.”

Lily knows better than to push her luck, otherwise she’ll be roped into some boring chore. “Will there be pudding?” She already knows the answer. It’s Friday so they get a Friday treat.

Her mum smiles, then. She doesn’t smile much. When Lily is older she will think of it as a secret smile: it doesn’t announce itself, and it’s gone before you’ve even had a chance to really notice it. But then memory does strange things; perhaps it isn’t like that at all. “There might be some angel delight. If you eat all your flan.”

The confirmation provokes mixed feelings. Her toes wriggle in anticipation at angel delight, but she’s bad at finishing food she doesn’t like. Perhaps if no one pays attention she can do her trick of making it seem to disappear without eating it.

Sometimes Lily has the strange sense that her mother can read her mind. Picking up her conflict as easily as with a pebble on the beach she says: “Being a woman is all about compromise, Lily.” She’s smiling a little as she says it but not really, like a joke Lily doesn’t get.

Compromise. A new, foreign word. “What’s compromise?” she asks, eventually. Petunia is looking up too. She doesn’t know what it means either, thinks Lily triumphantly. She just won’t admit it because she always wants to be the cleverest.

“A compromise is when you don’t get exactly what you want, but you get some of what you want. It’s neither one thing, nor the other. You agree to do something in between to keep everyone happy.”

Lily tries the new word out under her breath in a little rhythm: _compromise, compromise, compromise_. She isn’t sure what she thinks about this concept, or what it has to do with being a woman. But she isn’t a woman anyway. Neither is Petunia, even when she pretends to be. They’re girls. Only their mum is a woman. She wears lipstick and shoes with a pointy heel and spends her day doing all the things in the house while their dad is at work. Lily looks forward to their dad coming home because he picks them up and spins them around in circles and calls them Flower or Petal. Petunia says she’s too big for that now but Lily knows she secretly still likes it. Things are more fun when their dad is there. Sometimes their mum tells them both they’re not to talk to her and sits in the kitchen with the radio on smoking cigarettes. She can stay in there for hours, some days. It makes Lily’s tummy feel weird, like she’s done something wrong and is waiting to be found out.

“Compromise,” she says to herself again, committing it to memory. Then she skips out the back door.

  1. roommates



“Who do you fancy, Lily?” It’s Thalia Hopkirk who asks the question, late one evening in first year. The four of them are whispering awake in May Chang’s bed after lights out, still a little giddy with their newfound freedom and togetherness. Agatha Finch has produced some chocolate frogs from her trunk, a precious gift from home, a pretext for the gathering. Lily is too self-conscious to share around any of her ‘Muggle’ treats; even Severus turns his nose up at them now.

The question leaves her conflicted. She wants to answer, to keep this warm feeling of inclusion going. She thinks she likes her roommates, but it’s all so new, and not at all the same as it was with Petunia, or even the girls at Cokeworth Primary. Anyway, she doesn’t have anything to say. She’s so overwhelmed by the magic, the castle, the fact that this whole world _exists_. That all along it was there, humming in the space between her breaths. Probably if she tried to add fancying anyone into the mix her head would burst open like an overripe pear. She doesn’t even think she really knows how to fancy someone. It’s never come up before.

In the end she opts for the truth: “I don’t fancy anyone.”

“Come _on_. You must do.”

“Not really.”

“Not _really_! So a little bit, then.”

Thalia has already said she fancies Sirius Black. Even May, usually so shy, confessed to fancying James Potter. But Severus hates Black and Potter. It’s not like she could fancy someone that Severus doesn’t like. He’s her best friend. Sometimes he’s the only thing that makes any of this seem real. She bites her lip and then realises she’s doing it and stops. “I really don’t.”

“Oh well. Everyone knows you fancy Sniv – ” Thalia catches herself. “Snape, anyway.”

“I don’t! We’re friends.”

“You do spend an awful lot of time together, though, Lily,” says Agatha.

“That’s what friends do.”

“You spend more time with him than you do with us,” says May, quietly. Everyone goes silent. Lily feels her heart start to beat hard in her chest.

“I don’t mean to.”

“It’s okay,” says Agatha quickly, “We don’t mind or anything. It’s just, well – you can see why we thought...”

There is a lot contained in the _we_ , thinks Lily. They’ve been talking about her. All at once she feels detached from them, like a dull ache in her chest. May and Agatha look a little uncomfortable. Thalia merely looks as though she’s enjoying the drama of it.

“I do fancy someone,” she says, a little desperately. “But it’s not Sev.”

Instantly the mood changes. “Tell us!” they say. “Tell us!”

“After all it’s only fair,” says Thalia. “Since me and May told you.”

Maybe it’s not a lie, Lily tells herself. Maybe this is what it feels like to fancy someone, but because she’s never fancied anyone before she just doesn’t know how to recognise the feeling. After all she _likes_ him a lot, and she’s always happy if she gets partnered with him in something. “I fancy Remus Lupin,” she announces.

The discomfort settles over them like a heavy snow as the other three exchange glances. Lily knows she’s done something wrong, but she can’t for the life of her understand what. Then Thalia shrugs at Agatha and Agatha nods. “Agatha fancies Remus,” Thalia tells Lily. She feels her face get hot.

“It’s fine, Lily,” says Agatha, although she doesn’t look at her. “You weren’t to know.” Even May won’t meet her eye.

“Oh.” Lily isn’t sure what to say. She casts around for a way to fix the situation. “Well if Agatha fancies Remus then I suppose I fancy Peter.”

“But you just said you fancy Remus,” says May.

“Well I don’t anymore. Not if Agatha does.”

“That’s not how it works,” says Thalia. Lily understands then that the situation is beyond repair.

The party breaks up not long after that, Agatha muttering something about not wanting to be late for Charms in the morning. Lily pulls her hangings around her and lies miserably awake in her little cloth cave, wondering why she’s so useless at being a girl. At least tomorrow they have Charms with the Slytherins, so she can partner with Severus. She’s the only girl he talks to, so he won’t notice.

  1. crush



After she stops talking to Sev ( _mudblood_ ) Lily spends a lot of time alone. Mostly this is on purpose. Thalia, Agatha and May are thrilled, which is good, but sometimes makes her feel worse about everything. So she says she’s still studying for Transfiguration and takes refuge in the library, sometimes studying but other times just browsing through various dusty tomes of esoteric magic for kicks.

Lily is still not in love with James Potter. Or, if she is, she doesn’t yet know it. Approximately a year from now the nebulous sense of it around the edges of things will crystallise into something inexorable at the very core of herself. But for now she has other things on her mind. At this precise moment, June 1976: Mary MacDonald.

She sees Mary MacDonald for the first time in the library, hidden amongst the Charms shelves. Or rather she _sees_ her for the first time. Probably this is a little ironic, given the circumstances. Lily imagines that she, like Lily herself, is more or less hiding. About a month before the incident with Sev ( _mudblood_ ) there were whispers that she had a particularly nasty run-in with Edmund Mulciber. No one quite knows what happened, but Lily has heard things that she wishes she hadn’t.

In any case, people whispered about Mary MacDonald long before that. A year above them, she was already nearly notorious by the time they were third years. She’s Muggleborn, like Lily, and on weekends she wears a leather jacket and tight jeans of which Lily, still rather of the corduroy and flares persuasion, is both jealous and a little in awe. The other girls in her dormitory say she listens to strange Muggle music from London and even America on their coveted turntable, and spends whole afternoons inventing charms to get squawking, ugly sounds out of an electric guitar. Lily knows that even Sirius Black defers to her on most matters, and that sometimes he and Remus exchange records with her. Mostly what interests her, though, are the old rumours about her and Marlene McKinnon, one of the seventh year Ravenclaw girls. In the library she has a little badge pinned to her robes, which, on closer inspection (Lily did _need_ to get that book, after all, she had a reason to go and stand near her) reads: “Don’t die wondering.” It seems like a secret message, just for her.

Lily desperately wants to talk to Mary MacDonald, but that’s easier said than done. She spends a few hours staring over her books trying to contrive a reason for it, but her brain refuses to throw anything up. In the end she decides she’ll simply have to wait for Mary to talk to her. Following this decision are three days and an agony of impatience. Then:

“Lily Evans.” Mary comes up to walk next to her as she leaves the library one evening. It’s nearing dusk, her favourite time of day in the castle, and she can smell fresh cut grass drifting from the grounds through the open window. She has to concentrate so as not to look to eager.

“That’s me.”

“You used to be pretty tight with that Snape boy. The one who wanted to sleep outside the common room.”

“Used to be.” She makes the words sound hard, like the painful splintering of ice. Success: Mary nods approvingly.

“And one of Slughorn’s protégées.”

Lily stops walking and turns to her. Not many students are wandering the school at this time, being either in their common room or in one of the school’s hidden nooks and crannies for some precious privacy or peace. Her voice hums back a little in the empty corridor: “You seem to know a lot about me.”

“Well you’re not the only one who can watch.”

Her instinct is embarrassment, but then something else instead when she sees Mary smiling. Her heart seems to shimmy in her chest. “The library’s not a bad place for people watching.” Her tone conversational. She has no idea how to do this. Hopefully she’s doing this right. If it’s what she’s doing at all.

“I like the library. But the grounds are nicest this time of year.”

Lily nods. “Especially at this time in the evening.”

“I wouldn’t mind a walk, actually.”

“Me neither.” She meets Mary’s eye and something kindles inside her. Then without saying much more they head out to the grounds.

Kissing Mary MacDonald is different from kissing boys. Although, all being said Mary is only the third person she’s ever kissed, and she’s rather clearly more competent than either Duncan MacLaggen or Cledwyn Jones. It is the very first time she’s felt alive and lost in kissing, and she thinks it might be the most marvellous feeling in the world. Afterwards they lie back together on the grass, and Lily luxuriates (she thinks she’s never had such an apt use for the verb before) in the feeling of her swollen lips and warm evening breeze. The air smells of summer and things made new.

“So how long have you known?” asks Mary.

“Known what?” asks Lily, more to buy time than from genuine ignorance.

Mary snorts. “That you’re one of us. A lesbian.”

She takes in a breath. “Well, I like boys too.”

“Oh.”

Something in Lily clenches up as she waits for Mary to elaborate. She sits up slightly to turn and look at her. “That’s not normal, is it?” This is it, she realises. The confirmation of a hundred late night fears, a thousand.

But Mary only looks thoughtful. “I don’t see why not. It’s not like everyone has to be one thing or the other.”

Lily lays back down and looks up to the sky to hide her relief, which pummels through her with such a tidal force that she feels, mortifyingly, tears pressing up against throat. “When did you know?” she asks, to distract Mary or herself.

“God. Forever. I’ve always known.”

Lily can’t imagine knowing something like that, always. She wonders whether she’ll always be a mystery to herself. The future seems awfully big, and the space she takes up in the world at sixteen so very, very small.

Two things Lily Evans doesn’t know: she and Mary will never mention this evening again; Mary MacDonald will be missing presumed dead in the summer of 1979, during a spate of murders and assassinations that will become known as the worst in living Wizarding memory. They will never find the body.

  1. teacher



She raps on the door twice.

“You may enter.”

She does so, hovering a little. Professor McGonagall’s office is small and cosy, the chairs upholstered in tartan and the walls decorated with pictures of Highland landscapes. In them the grass moves gently in some distant captured breeze. Her desk, which she sits behind, is meticulously neat. She raises her eyebrows over her glasses. “Miss Evans. Do sit down.”

Lily does, tentatively. Privately she admires McGonagall, and as such tends to stick up for her even when Thalia employs some rather choice adjectives over the course of yet another three foot essay on elemental laws. But still, a little childishly, she can’t help but feel as though she’s in trouble. McGonagall possesses a singular capacity to intimidate. “You asked to see me, Professor.” State the bloody obvious, she thinks.

“I did indeed.” Then she smiles. It’s such a genuine smile, with such warmth, that for a moment Lily finds herself disoriented. It seems abruptly that they are not simply teacher and student, but two witches in a world not altogether kind and apparently becoming less so. Still, she is not remotely prepared for what comes next. “Miss Evans, as your Head of House it is my pleasure to inform you that after much discussion with the other Heads of Houses and with Professor Dumbledore, you have been selected as next year’s Hogwarts Head Girl.”

The rush of emotion seems to catch somewhere in her oesophagus. In all honesty she has not allowed herself to consider it, let alone expected. “I...thank you.” She wants to say more, but her voice sounds dangerously thick. She tries to cough surreptitiously. “I thought we wouldn’t find out until the summer.”

“Normally that would be the case, and I would ask you to exercise discretion in sharing this good news amongst friends until the book lists are distributed in August. But I think, and Professor Dumbledore agrees, that you might appreciate such good news a little in advance.”

Again she finds herself at a loss. “I see. I’m grateful. Thank you.” She wants to say again and again, thank you thank you thank you. Like a stuck record. “Would I be able to tell Thalia, Agatha and May?”

“I would think so, provided they can exercise their own discretion.”

“Thank you.” She wants to say something else but she’s not sure what. She wants to say every thought that’s been bubbling to the surface since that awful day going on a year ago now ( _mudblood_ ). Bizarrely and yet undeniably, she wants to confide in Professor McGonagall. She wants to talk to a woman who might understand.

It is as though McGonagall, like she always felt her mother could, can simply read her thoughts. She speaks as though replying to them, looking hard at Lily over the lenses of her glasses. “Miss Evans, to be Head Girl is a great honour. You will be following in the footsteps of a great number of witches who have gone on to bring pride not only to this school, but to the Wizarding community as a whole. Their achievements have been great and diverse, and we have no doubt that you, too, will carry forth the tradition. Myself, Professor Dumbledore, and the other Heads of House – indeed particularly Professor Slughorn – could not imagine a witch more suited to the job, or indeed more deserving. I would like you to take stock of that.”

She meets McGonagall’s gaze and nods once, swallowing. Later she will trace the first tugging threads of it back to this moment: the understanding that there is a cause, that she is implicated in it by simple circumstance of birth, and that she is not alone.

  1. friends



Thalia drops down next to her on the armchair. “Budge up,” she orders, over the talking and the music. Lily obliges. They sit there for a moment, companiably. Lily taps her foot to the music. Someone (she suspects Sirius and/or Remus) has put on a Patti Smith record, to mixed responses. Thalia takes a swig from a bottle of Firewhiskey. “Want some?”

“Go on then.” She takes it and coughs a little as it goes down. She passes it back. “Ta.”

“Where’s lover-boy then?”

“Supposed to be getting a drink. I imagine he’s probably with Sirius.”

“So that’s why you’re here all alone?”

“He only left a second ago!”

“Still, Evans, I’m disappointed in you. Head Girl at probably the last ever common room party and here you are not so much as dancing.”

“I was dancing a minute ago.” She over at Thalia and smiles. “Also I’m a bit pissed to be honest.”

Thalia raises her eyebrows in mock horror. “Head Girl, pissed? We’ll never make it out of here alive.”

“God, don’t say that,” says Lily, automatically. Then regrets it as Thalia, too, seems to fall into thoughts not entirely pleasant.

“Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry. Fuck. Shall we have a dance after all?”

“Yeah, all right.”

They stand together and go to near the magically amplified turntable (donated, in the end, to the general good by Mary MacDonald and her roommates when they left) and find Agatha and May. They dance, the four of them together, and Lily tries to forget. The Death Eaters, as they styled themselves now, came to them in Hogsmeade, the week before their exams. Her and James were on a date. Perhaps they didn’t even realise she was Muggleborn, she thought afterwards. “You’ll not come near us with that filthy propaganda again,” she said at the time, not knowing where it came from, the ability to say it as her heartbeat battered hard against her eardrums.

“You’ve made some powerful enemies today, girl,” they said, then turned to James. “Blood traitor,” they spat, before Apparating with a sickening crack. Afterwards she was shaking and James, for all his furious, righteous speech, looked very pale. He held her hand tightly on the way back to the castle. Still, they haven’t talked about it much since. She wants believe in the romantic notion that they simply don’t have to, but really she thinks it’s more to do with the way that fears take shape when you speak them, like breath on a frigid day.

So she won’t speak them. She won’t even think it, now.

“We will stay friends, won’t we, Lily?” says Thalia, taking her by surprise. "You’re not going to piss off with lover boy and forget all about us, are you?”

Lily takes her hand and spins her, a silly joke of a dance move, before squeezing it tightly. “Of course not."

“Good.” Then from nowhere she leans forward and embraces her tightly. “Good.”

  1. comrades



It had gone catastrophically wrong. What was supposed to be a simple reconnaissance mission had turned into a battle, and they were grievously outnumbered. She sent out Stunning spell after Stunning spell, unsure if she hit her target or not. A jet of green light missed her by inches. Then she felt the grip of a hand on hers, and before she knew what was happening she was compressed, suffocating with it, and now lands on her hands and knees in the sand.

She stares around her, frantic, somehow unable to get up. Everything fragments. Gritty sand under her hands. The sound of waves. The moon casting its cold light over the water. Dorcas’ voice. “Lily. Lily get up. Get up we have to go again. You’d better do it this time.” Lily gasps, trying to make sense of it. She can’t work out if the whooshing noise in her ears is another curse of simply the roaring of her blood. “Lily. Now!” Something in her clicks into place. The safe house. The safe house. She grips Dorcas’ ankle, reaching under her trouser leg, and wills them forth with every particle of her being. The safe house. The safe house. The safe –

“Dorcas!”

This time she lands standing, and grips the doorframe for support. They are surrounded by hills now, dark and imposing under the stars. She hears Marlene’s voice, high and taut. “Are you all right? Is she all right?”

“Security!” snaps Dorcas.

“What did you drink on our first date?” asks Marlene.

“Nothing. We got stoned in your landlady’s bathroom. How did you get your ears pierced?”

“You did it, with a needle and freezing charm, that same night.”

“Lily...”

“It’s her,” says Dorcas.  “We haven’t been separated.”

This is all it takes for Marlene to grip her by the shoulders and shepherd her firmly inside the house. “Thank you,” says Lily vaguely. She watches Marlene and Dorcas embrace.

“I’m all right, we’re all right,” Dorcas is murmuring. “No one was hurt.” She pulls away, leaving Marlene to push her hair roughly away from her face, hand shaking slightly. “Lily. Come on. Are you okay?”

She doesn’t feel as though she is, but is starting to feel too embarrassed to say so. “Yeah. Fine.” She’s pleased to hear that her voice sounds steady.

“What happened?” asks Marlene.

“We’ll tell you over a drink,” says Dorcas.

Marlene nods. “I think there’s Firewhiskey in the kitchen.”

They sit at the kitchen table and Marlene takes out three mugs, pouring a generous measure of whiskey into each and distributing them. Dorcas downs hers in a single gulp. Marlene tops it up without asking. “Drink yours, Lily,” she says. “It will help.” Lily sips at it.

“They knew we were there,” says Dorcas, after a moment. “I don’t know how.”

“How many?”

“At least five,” Lily surprises herself by replying.

“It was hard to tell,” adds Dorcas. “More kept appearing.”

“Did you recognise any of them?”

“Avery, definitely,” says Lily. As she speaks something curls horribly in her stomach. “He was in my year at Hogwarts. I recognised...the voice.” _Avada Kedavra_ , he had yelled. She takes another drink from her mug, a bigger swig this time. Marlene offers silently to top her up, but she shakes her head.

“How did you get out of there?” she asks.

“Dorcas...” begins Lily, but Dorcas cuts her off.

“Apparated. It took a few minutes before I could get close enough to Lily to side-along her. It was mad out there, too risky to try separately, in case one of us got left behind.”

“You saved my life.” Lily understands, all at once, the real implications of this.

“Any of us would have done the same.”

Lily nods, momentarily unable to speak. Marlene takes her hand and squeezes. “Was it your first time? Like that?”

As she nods again, she feels the tears start to slide down her cheeks. It’s wholly unstoppable, as though her face has simply caved in like the crust of a pie. She hasn’t cried since her mother died, two years ago. Eventually, she manages: “I’m so sorry. I’m not backing out – I would never – ”  

“We know, my love,” says Marlene, her hand still resting gently on Lily’s own.

“I just didn’t know it would be like that...”

“None of us did,” says Dorcas. “Not like that. Like it really is, out there.” Lily looks up to see her and Marlene exchange a look. It’s a look between lovers, impenetrable to outsiders. Still, she understands that there is only kindness for her in it. Her gratitude makes her want to cry again, but she masters herself.

“Sorry,” she says again, and swallows.

“Listen, Lily,” says Marlene. “We all knew what we were getting into when we agreed to do this, and none of us can promise you that it will be okay. But as hard as it is, you have to just put these feelings away. You’ve had a shock, but you’re okay. You’re not hurt. No one can tell any of us what’s to come in the future, but right now, you’re okay. Yeah? You’re okay.”

“Yeah.” Lily wipes her eyes on her sleeve. “Fuck. I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologise,” says Dorcas. “Not to us.”

“We’re in this together,” says Marlene. “We understand.”

Lily looks between the two of them and feels the terror loosen its grip, ever so slightly, from around her chest. “Thank you,” she whispers.

  1. sister



“I can’t have any of that nonsense, Lily. You know Vernon won’t stand for it.”

“Vernon doesn’t have to come, then.”

“Of course Vernon has to come,” Petunia snaps. “He’s my husband.”

Lily pinches the bridge of her nose in an effort to calm herself. She can’t tell the truth, which is – what? _No, I don’t know why I want you at my wedding either, but I could die any day and I’m trying to make things right_. There’s no simpler way to put it, and yet the starkness of the words would seem inadequate. Perhaps the very power of the idea is its own unspeakable nature. Particularly standing here, in the old kitchen, which somehow seems so small and dingy compared to her childhood memories of it. And yet this was once her home. This was once her life. It was her mother’s whole life, near enough.

“Tuney...” As soon as the old nickname is out she regrets it. It doesn’t sound affectionate; it sounds silly and wrong. “I know things haven’t always been easy between us.” Petunia snorts, but Lily makes herself continue. “I _know_ , but this is my wedding, and you’re my sister, and I want you to be there. And think of Dad, what it would mean for him.”

“ _I_ think of Dad plenty,” says Petunia, viciously. “I’m the one who comes over and checks he has a hot meal on the table and the house isn’t a complete _state_ , while you’re off doing – making – ” Petunia seems momentarily to sputter in her flow. “Oh, I don’t know what your lot do! Make sparks fly off a stick when it’s high time you found a proper job!”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Lily quietly. She breathes in deeply through her nose. What would Professor McGonagall do? Or Dorcas, or Marlene? Marlene, at least, would say she doesn’t mean it. She doesn’t mean it, so just put it away. She breathes out. “Look. I’m not going to have a Muggle ceremony – ” Petunia interrupts with a sharp intake of breath. “Oh, all right, a Christian ceremony then. The point is I’m not changing the way I do my wedding for your husband’s benefit. _But_ , I will make it clear to everyone that things are different where I come from, and ask people to be tactful...”

“Tactful!” Petunia lets out a shrill laugh. “I’ve seen the way your lot behave! You turn up to Kings Cross station with bloody owls and frogspawn and no doubt all sorts of illegal rubbish!”

“You’ve started to talk just like Vernon,” says Lily, before she means to.

Caught off guard, Petunia gapes at her for a moment. Then she regains her composure. “Good. I’m proud of the man I married.”

There’s a cavernous silence as they both, it seems, hold back with a sincere effort from saying something that they might forever regret. Such as: _the man I’m marrying is a million times the man Vernon will ever be._ Such as: _do you even know you’re wasting your precious, precious life_? Then Lily speaks: “You don’t have to come to the reception. Just the ceremony. Please, Petunia. For Dad, if not for me.”

“But there’s going to be _funny business_ at the ceremony.”

Exasperated, Lily smacks her hand down on the worktop. “Well, you know what Mum always said Petunia. Being a woman is all about fucking compromise.”

She shouldn’t have said it. She shouldn’t have, and she knows it straight away. They never discuss their mother, and certainly they never throw the spectre of her around in arguments. For a moment Petunia’s face is wide open in a way Lily isn’t sure she’s seen since childhood. But then it closes up again, and her expression is strange. So too is her voice, curiously flat as she speaks:

“Mum never said that.”

“What?” Though of course she heard.

Louder this time: “Mum never said that.”

“Of course she did.”

“No, Lily.” Petunia’s face hardens slightly. “Mum used to say that being a woman is about _sacrifice_.”

Did she? Could her memory be so unreliable? She tries to peer into the past, to remember her mother saying that. _Being a woman is about sacrifice_. What a strange thing to say to a young girl. Yet undeniably it sounds like the kind of thing her mother might have said.

As Lily’s thoughts race, Petunia picks her handbag up off the kitchen table. “I’m going out,” she says. “To meet Tilly.” She walks to the kitchen door and then hesitates a moment, hand poised over the handle. “I’ll speak to Vernon. About the ceremony. But _only_ the ceremony. All right?”

“All right.” Her voice sounds strange to her own ears. Petunia leaves the room without saying goodbye.

  1. mother-to-be



Through the window Lily can see Sirius in the back garden, showing his bike enthusiastically to Frank, James occasionally pointing out a feature that he suggested. The sound of their laughter travels in through the open window as she drops another teabag in the pot. “Do you think just the one extra will do it?”

“I should think so,” calls Alice from the front room. “Are you sure you don’t want a hand?”

“Oh, I think I can manage.” She sets the pot back on the tray and carries it through, placing it on James’ mother’s old coffee table, which takes pride of place in the middle of the room.

“Thank you, darling,” says Alice. “You sit down now. I’ll be mother.” They both laugh. In fact , as it turned out they became pregnant at almost exactly the same time. Privately, Lily thinks Alice probably wears it better. Her round belly matches her round, friendly cheeks, and pregnancy seems to have given her a perpetual rosy glow of health. Lily, by comparison, mostly feels a little bedraggled, and hyper-aware of her bladder.

“Thank you,” she says, as Alice passes her a teacup. Again, Euphemia’s fine china. At times it feels as though their house is a wonky replica of what had been the Potters’ home, everything crammed clumsily in. She hopes it’s helping James with their loss, but she isn’t sure. Some things there’s no helping. Knowing that seems like wisdom, if nothing else, and she wonders if Little Bean (as she thinks of the baby growing inside her) is somehow imbibing it. Then again, she’s not sure if she wants Little Bean to be quite so aware of some things just yet. Her hand drifts absently to her belly. _All right there, Little Bean?_ Little Bean doesn’t kick, so she thinks they might be sleeping.

“I don’t know why I’m getting so comfortable,” says Alice, settling back into the sofa. “I’m only going to need the loo again in a minute.” They laugh, rich and warm. This is why she loves seeing Alice. The laughter, and that she makes this seem normal. It’s reassuring to pretend for afternoons at a time that their lives aren’t at risk, that their husbands aren’t still fighting battles while they sit here, indisposed, like bloated Austen heroines. _You’re okay now_ , says Marlene, eighteen months ago, before the killings had even really started. _Just put it away_.

“So what were you saying? Before?”

“Oh Merlin,” says Alice. “Just that Augusta seems to have plenty of ideas about how to raise the baby, and I’m not entirely convinced. I mean, Frank says his uncle Algernon used to throw things at him when he was a child to see if he’d divert them with magic. I hardly think that’s the way you’re supposed to go about it. He keeps poking at my belly when we see him, as if he’s already trying to get at the poor thing.”

“Poor mite,” says Lily, with feeling. A Muggle woman in the street asked to touch her belly the other day, as though it were a perfectly acceptable request. Sometimes she wonders whether to ask Alice the questions that scream through her head on nights when James is out on a mission. Or else she thinks them in moments of sheer visceral terror, catching her unawares as she wipes the worktop or makes the bed: _Do you ever feel like people see you as a vessel now? Do you ever wonder how it will feel when they cut the baby away from you? Do you ever wonder if we’re doing the right thing_?

“Yes, well.” Lily can feel Alice working herself up now. “If Frank won’t stand up to them I certainly will. I mean if we can stand up to bloody Voldemort...” She suddenly glances over to Lily, and Lily realises she doesn’t have to ask the questions. They both know the answers.

“Sorry,” says Alice, setting her teacup down a little too heavily on her saucer.

“Don’t apologise.”

“I always mean not to mention it.”

“But why shouldn’t we? Ignoring it won’t make it go away.”

“If only we could just talk about motorbikes,” says Alice, laughing a little uncertainly.

“I’m not sure how much I’d enjoy that, to be honest,” says Lily, and they both laugh again, properly this time. “I’m so glad I have you, Alice.” She’s not exactly sure what’s prompted her to say it.

Alice’s eyes look a little wet, and she blinks quickly. “Merlin knows how glad I am to have _you_.”

Lily smiles and starts to feel a little tearful herself. She’s been crying all the time since Caradoc and the Prewetts died. It’s as though now she’s started she simply can’t stop. She tells herself it’s the hormones. Not wanting to get properly upset, she says quickly: “I meant to tell you: I’ve been thinking of names.”

“Oh really?” Alice, too, seems keen to avoid any more overt emotion.

“Yes. I was thinking Harry.”

“Not short for anything?”

“No. Just Harry.”

“Harry Potter,” says Alice, out loud. She smiles gently. “I like it.”

“Yes,” says Lily, and smiles back. “I think I do, too.”

  1. neighbour



It wasn’t an argument, as such, but it was close enough. Now the air in the house seems thick and noxious, and so she sends an owl over to Bathilda Bagshot to invite her round. Leaving Harry gurgling happily in his little pen in the front room, she goes to the kitchen to put the kettle on in preparation. Ignores how awful she’s starting to find it, being separated from him even moments at a time. She knows it’s been so much worse since the McKinnons. Perhaps because Marlene would have been his godmother.

James is outside, bent determinedly over where he grows the vegetables at the end of the garden. He’s taken to doing things the Muggle way; he says he likes to use his hands. Half the time these days his wand is left lying carelessly around, and more than once Lily has had to move it out of Harry’s reach. She can’t make herself get angry, not when she understands so much how he feels.

Marlene is dead. Dorcas is dead. Alice is in hiding. She hasn’t spoken to Thalia, Agatha or May since Christmas ’78. Neither she nor James has spoken to Remus since February. James thinks that he and Sirius have had some kind of falling out, but Sirius remains uncharacteristically secretive about the circumstances of this if it took place, and neither of them wants to ask. Now even when Peter and Sirius come over the visit is marked by long silences, conversational potholes that none of them have the resources to fill. Sometimes Lily goes upstairs to feed Harry, just for an excuse to get away and cry quietly. It seems as though magic has simply betrayed them, the world having presented them with a situation that it so definitively cannot fix.

So yes, she understands how he feels. But still they argue, and she misses the company of other women. She knows that James, too, is relieved that Bathilda is always available to come over, if only for her own sake. Perhaps he will come in and join them later.

Yet once Bathilda has come in and sat down, greetings out the way and sipping at her tea, Lily finds herself drifting off. This happens to her these days. It’s as though she’s simply lost the capacity to focus. Perhaps her mind is so under-stimulated that it’s become sluggish. As such she finds herself hearing Bathilda’s voice only mid-sentence.

“...predicted this war, you know?”

“Pardon?”

Bathilda looks a little irritated. “I said I predicted this war. In 1970. In my book, _The Second Wizarding War_. Of course the _Prophet_ tore it to shreds – well, look at that rag. But all of this could have been prevented if it weren’t for men running things, too greedy and blind to look beyond the ends of their noses.”

Lily’s stomach has jerked as if on a hook, and she finds herself at a momentary loss. This is the first time Bathilda has so much as mentioned the war, let alone revealed she predicted it. “Sorry – so you’re a seer?”

“A seer?” Bathilda now looks angrier than Lily’s ever seen her. “There’s no such thing if you ask me. Codswallop. No, I’m a historian. We see patterns. This war’s been obvious since the mid-sixties: the anti-werewolf legislation for one, not to mention the Muggle-baiting outbreak in ’69 and Abraxas Malfoy’s stranglehold over the Wizengamot.” She leans forward dramatically in her chair. “You listen to me, Lily. It’s men that started this war, and it won’t be men who end it. It will be women. Do you hear me? Women, like you and me.”

She looks as though she wants to say more, but they are interrupted by James’ appearance in the doorway. As though guilty of something, Bathilda hastily takes her leave. Afterwards it all seems so bizarre that Lily wonders if she imagined it.

  1. self



There are no thoughts. There is only terror and the one, sole purpose.

“Not Harry! Please, not Harry!”

After all, in the end it is one thing. One thing, one thing, one thing, one –

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to literally anyone who gave this strange little fic a chance and read to the end. I've long since been interested in Lily Evans Potter as a character: her sacrifice is the centre of the whole hp universe, yet we only ever learn about her through the eyes of men. If you enjoyed this fic, if I messed up somewhere, or if you too have many feelings about Lily Evans Potter, please feel free to comment or to shoot me a message @ [r-ougeatre](https://r-ougeatre.tumblr.com/) on tumblr x


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